This is increasingly a priority for our team. The ability to tie a projects sections (and thus board columns) to a custom field would add amazing flexibility to a project.
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As @Myroslav_Opyr said, you can do this now with Asana’s Rules:
Use case: we use a new project to plan each product release with sections across product, design, eng, QA etc. Under the eng section we have all the features & big fixes and a custom field for “waiting”, “doing”, “done” to track progress of the release.
Problem: we want a clean board view for engineers to be able to review the waiting feature/bug, decide which to work on, move it to the doing column, and then move to the done column when done.
Solution 1: we create 3 sections in the list = Eng - Doing, Eng - Waiting, Eng - Done which are then reflected in the board. In board view you can hide columns we don’t want (eg. product, design) so that just these 3 eng columns show.
Solution 2: the ideal solution that I think would provide a lot more flexibility for any user is that you can choose how to build your board structure ie each column = each section (default and live today), each column = the fields in a custom field. Choosing the latter, we would create a status custom field in the list (waiting, doing, done) and a board structured by this custom field so that the columns are waiting, doing, done. Changing the custom field in the list view moves the task to another column in the board view, moving the column in the board view changes the custom field in the list view. Check out how Airtable provide this flexibility for their kanban view: Customizing Kanban View | Airtable Support
I know Rules can somewhat enable this if we create a separate project for the board view, but we need both the list and board view contained in 1 project.
In your case I would move away from board, use list and sort by custom field. You can then run a search, save it as a report, and do the same thing in the report, with only a fraction of the tasks.
Yes, this a an important feature that may keep us on Teamwork.com.
This is not really solved. @Uri_Kutner was really asking for a general feature of linking sections/board columns to a user selected custom field (or standard field). This would allow users to set standard workflows across multiple projects as they see fit without the need to use multiple unnecessary rules every time a new project is created. In my opinion this is how sections / board columns should have been implemented in the first place. The flexibility and ease of use would have been amazing.
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Definitely needed! Sections don’t always correlate with boards.
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Does anyone else not have use cases where the AGILE approach via SCRUM or KANBAN would be ideal? I’m surprised this feedback does have more votes! 
Viewing Backlog in a List View with Sections as the status for tasks doesn’t make sense, but it’s the only way for the Board view to be functional when managing tasks through a Sprint. This suggestion to have columns replaced by Custom Fields creates so much flexibility that helps make Asana a much more competitive platform for the AGILE approach.
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Any news on this? Again, have a look how Notion handles Boards (GIF published by @Shneor , where you can choose Fields instead of Sections.
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Not just yet @TomSolid but rest ensure that I’ll keep you informed here as soon as I get any update!
Thank you for your suggestion Thomas and welcome to the Forum! 
@Uri_Kutner Shouldn’t the Product idea read ‘Tie board columns to custom fields’. ?
Tomato tomato. The link is bi-directional
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This would be really useful especially when using projects for epics/features.
By that I mean that all projects using that field (re-usable field) would automatically have the same columns and when a given task field is updated, it automatically moves to the given column across all projects. This is also a huge deal from a “board setup” maintenance perspective as it gives possibility to update columns for all boards using a that field by simply changing the field “options”.
This also mean that we can create master boards without much maintenance.
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Sure it is bi-directional, but from a UX perspective I agree that presenting as “Tie board columns to custom fields” makes more sense. Why? Mostly in the context of using that field on multiple projects, it makes it easier to understand that updating the given field will affect “all boards columns tied to that field”.
I think this would be a great feature. The prevailing thought around Sections is to use those for major features/sections of a project, so then we need something else to determine the columns of a board view. I would like to have the ability to have the board view be able to use the values of a “Status” field that is a dropdown type so that we can still have Sections for list view, and allow some users to view the project in a kanban form as well.
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Not sure why this request is marked as ‘solved’. We have the same request: Allow board columns to reflect a custom field instead of sections. It’s a major blocker. Here’s an example:
- Project: Add feature X to website
- Sections: Datasheet, testimonial video, etc.
- Tasks: Update webpage copy, Update website navigation, etc.
- Statuses: In draft, in copy review, in legal review, in staging, live, etc.
This is quite a normal hierarchy and we currently can’t use board view at all without completely sacrificing the list view.
Atlassian just announced Jira Work Management for non-software development use cases. Will be checking it out as we have a license.
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@Natalia. Perhaps Asana should consider developing an additional board view! One that links columns to custom fields (or sections). When this is complete I’m sure no one would use the existing format.
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While this does answer the question, and works quite well (thanks for the suggestion!), it’s limited in that it will only work with a single dropdown field. For example, I could set it up on my “Status” field and corresponding sections for “to-do”, “doing” and “done”. But I also have a second drop down list in a particular project, for Priority, “high”, “medium” and “low”.
- I’m still limited in that I can’t choose (on a whim anyway) to switch to board view by priority instead of by status.
- I’m also limited in my ability to use the list mode, sorted by priority. Asana displays it it list mode as a tree- at the top level I get the priority, then underneath that, “to-do”, “doing” and “done” Statuses. Sure, I can turn on “Sort within Sections”, which makes it look better in that I only have one sort level, but this isn’t the way I want to look at my project.
- I’ll make a note – this isn’t a problem when sorting in list view by some other types of fields, like sorting the task name alphabetically or by date (e.g. a due date or a start date).
I strongly believe this is a feature that should be built-in.
@Ezra_Tucker, Welcome to Asana Forum.
Your request can be considered as different from the topic of the thread. Can you create a new one with a description of your particular use case and DM me about it?
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@Asana_Admin1 Any progression on this. Kanban view is much clearer for design teams, but it’s becoming a challenge for multi-level team with very large and complex projects. We are asking non-pm teams to self serve, but creating rules and multiple boards for the same project creates a lot of confusion, duplication and large overhead, as mentioned in previous posts, Notion & Airtable are doing this very well being able to sort by different data fields Tie custom field to board columns - #10
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